A ministry invites you to consider the real gift of Christmas

USA (MNN) — It's November 17.
Already, the stores in the United States are decked out with Christmas gear and
reminders are everywhere of the Black Friday shopping bonanza that takes place
on the day after Thanksgiving.

If you go online, the reminders are
equally prolific. Type in the word "catalog," and over four million results come up. It seems that nearly everyone
is doing some kind of gift catalog.

So, amid
the clamors for attention, what makes the Kids Alive International gift catalog stand
out? Kristian
Pruit, Director of Marketing and Communications for Kids Alive, says, "We are
intensely involved in their lives on a daily basis. That makes these gifts so
much more valuable. It's not just that we pull into a community and hand
out gifts and then walk away from the kids. We have a relationship with the
children that we minister to."

For the kids they work with, Christmas is a
totally foreign concept. "These children
that don't know Christ have never known Christmas. This is a brand new holiday
for them, and so we use this as an opportunity to show them and open their eyes to the hope of Jesus, the love of Jesus."

Kids Alive teams teach the children about the
God who "so loved the world." "He gives
us the grace and the gift of His life and salvation, and that's symbolically represented
in the Christmas exchanging of gifts."

But the reality is that the kids need food
in their stomachs, clothes on their backs, and shoes on their feet. The Kids Alive 2010 Christmas Gift Catalog invites you to
be a part of giving hurting children a life without hunger and disease, a warm
and loving Christian home, and a future of hope. "Most of the time when we receive an orphan or an abandoned
child, they have no shoes and just the clothing on their back. These are basic
items that we so often just take for granted: food, clothing, a pair of shoes,
books and school supplies, their own individual Bible, and also a toy."

Each day,
through your prayers and gifts, God is opening the little eyes of these hurting
children to the love of Jesus. Pruitt explains that "people
can really feel that they are blessing a child when they give this gift,
similar to their own family, when they're giving a family member a gift and they
can feel that sense of joy and anticipation that the children are going to
have."

Orphaned and abandoned children are
starving for affection. And they
desperately need to know that their Heavenly Father loves and cares for them.
Each gift that you give shares that life-changing message of Jesus with an
innocent girl or boy. The gifts through this ministry make a
difference. Click here for details.